It is known in the art of commercial photographic processing to maintain very high rates of processing in order to operate profitably. Recent developments in photographic systems include the combination of silver halide and magnetics technologies. New film formats have a magnetic strip containing magnetic information that must be processed on compatible equipment. These new films also include additional optical information such as bar coded film ID number and frame numbers, and print aspect ratio and cartridge hand of load, known as "fat " bits. New and conventional photographic processing equipment must be able to read and interpret this information so that photographic as well as index prints can be generated.
Commercial photographic processing systems are unable to process film formats including encoded magnetic data, encoded optical data, and imaging data at any rate of speed.